Oddly enough, I think this project to assimilate the linux kernel would be much more successful if all mention of Oberonish things are kept silent. The thing that the Linux community seems to embrace is yet another tiny C compiler. So, one possible way to begin the assimilation is to use a C to C translator on the kernel, and look for ways to simplify things. For example, I think the two constructs "const int x" and "int const x" are equivalent, but as Frasier and Hanson mention in the lcc book, the flexibility makes extra work for the compiler. It should be possible to instrument the compiler and look for total usage statistics, machine translate the source to use the dominate usage, and produce source for the kernel that only use one paradigm. This would result in a smaller, stricter grammar that describes the source, and hence a smaller faster compiler.